And every Saturday evening of my childhood, after tea, for as long as I could remember, I had bought a comic with Carol.

Before the strange time began, when Tarzan and Our Gang and the M.G.M. lion were enough, I was loyal to Mandrake and Batman and the Phantom. Now, even this had changed. Unaccountably, feeling secretly ashamed, I bought the love comics that before only other girls read.

We walked to Len Robert’s Bookshop down the blue street after tea. Mothers and fathers and children had disappeared. The streets were given over to people all young, all dressed in their best, all going somewhere. There was another line now outside the Odeon; there were men in suits and ties outside the Daisy Dell. The milk-shake machines chattered, the neon lights flashed. From the Assembly Rooms we heard the wail of saxophones; were brushed by the net and sequin skirts of girls in ballerinas, and smelt their perfume, and knew it was almost time for the Prides of Erin and Military Two Steps to begin.

(The girls are beautiful, they smell of a thousand flowers. As I pay the shilling that entitles me to share the love of the pony-tailed freshman and the crew-cut instructor, the memory of their net and sequins and perfume threads the shop. It pursues us as we hurry from the lights to the nunnery of Rose Street; as we cloister ourselves behind a screen of bridesmaid’s fern on Carol’s verandah.)

Twenty-Nine

TWENTY-NINE

I stayed at the Technical School.

(And even as the litmus paper in the science lesson soaks up the acid and is transformed, so we soak up obediently the veiled references to our status, with which we are fed daily. Our expectations are swallowed by shorthand symbols, hammered by typewriter keys, imprisoned by the columns of a neatly-ruled ledger whose credit column never balances its debit.)

I was part of a school that was a factory, pumping forth each year, from the swollen Commercial class, the girls of fifteen who would go to work as typists and clerks. At eighteen they would be engaged, at twenty — married, at thirty — old. And these were the girls I stood with under the lacquered fig-trees in the Grade Seven photograph. (They are at their prime at the age of twelve; then, like Janet when she dreams of the spangled circus life, they can do anything. Three years later the dream will be gone, replaced by a routine that stills the small voice that asks: Is this enough? — is this all it is? with material objects. Not once have thoughts of the meaning of life — or its lack of meaning, which is the same — been allowed to enter their heads. They do not marvel at the lines charted on their palm, at the weeds they trample underfoot in their concrete gardens, at sun, sky, moon. All the wild poetry is locked away; only the synthetic — the secondary, is exalted.)